Prince Harry (naked!)

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Last week, Prince Harry displayed the royal weiner to some bachelorette-party girls in Las Vegas while playing billiards.

 

 

What fun!

 

 

I love the British royals. British history is a lot more fun than American history, because you can attach it to personalities: noble William the Conqueror, imperial Henry II, military Edward I, too-many-kids Edward III, etc., etc. It’s history that you can map as a family tree.

 

 

But let’s face it, it’s all about sex: who married who, who had whose bastards, who was gay, etc., etc. I mean, I know the name of Henry II’s mistress! And Edward II’s (two) boyfriends! And a couple of Henry VIII’s mistresses! So who are we kidding here?

 

 

Prince Harry is not my type. He is gingery and skinny, and he inherited most of the worst qualities from both his parents: Diana’s fairness and Charles’s clunky features. Seeing him naked does not charge up my batteries, or blow up my skirt.

 

 

Also, he will probably never be more than a prince. Wills and Kate are almost certainly destined to be K. and Q., and Kate will almost certainly produce a few kiddoes.

 

 

But I give Prince Harry credit for showing the meat-and-two-vegetables. He’s following in the footsteps of a long and noble line of ancestors.

 

 

Bully for Prince Harry!

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Neil Armstrong

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Neil Armstrong, the quietest celebrity in modern memory, died last weekend at 82. He was a household name, but a very private man, I knew him through books about the space program, especially "Carrying the Fire," the wonderful autobiographical / historical book written by Apollo 13 crew member Michael Collins.

 

 

You can tell in photos how guarded Armstrong was; even when smiling, there’s a sort of veil over his eyes.  In my favorite photo (at the head of this article), taken by one of his Apollo 11 crewmates, Armstrong actually looks exhilarated, and open, and exhausted, and happy.

 

 

I’d ask if you remember that evening in July 1969 when Armstrong first stepped onto the moon’s surface, but I remind myself that many of you are too young for that; it would be like you asking me if I remembered when the Confederates started firing on Fort Sumter.

 

 

But I remember it. We’d just come home from a day trip to my Grandma Boitano’s house. I was twelve years old. I remember sitting in our living room in the twilight, watching the spectacle on television – a man on the moon! – and then getting up to look out the picture window at the moon (which I remember as being maybe six days old, a little less than first quarter). I remember thinking: There are human beings up there right now.

 

 

And I got a little shiver.

 

 

Memory is tricky. I go online now, and check myself. What was the phase of the moon on July 20, 1969?

 

Six days after new.

 

 

I actually remembered my childhood accurately.

 

 

Woo-hoo!

 

 

Armstrong’s family has asked that, “next time you see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.”

 

 

I think that’s lovely.

 

 

And we have to keep the moon in its place, after all, as the following clip (featuring Tina Fey and Buzz Aldrin) demonstrates:

 

 

 

 

Rest in peace, Neil.

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Blog extra: Hurricane Isaac

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Just a quickie between regular posts.

 

 

The above illustration is a weathermap of Hurricane Isaac's projected path up through the Gulf of Mexico.

 

 

Gay conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan opined that Isaac was definitely not a Republican hurricane, since it resembled a large purple penis surrounded by a rainbow halo.

 

 

This was pretty hilarious, until I read another comment today, from a woman blogger, sayiing that it looks much more like a uterus than a penis.

 

 

Either way, it works for me. 

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Finding a new (alternate) fragrance

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I keep a bottle of cologne in the office, for emergencies. I had an emergency the other day: I had a doctor’s appointment (my doctor’s office is right across the street from my office), and I forgot to put on cologne that morning.


I don’t want to offend my doctor, do I?


My emergency cologne is L’Occitane’s “Eau des Vanilliers,” which is a not-very-good follow-up to their original “Vanille.” “Vanille” smelled like natural vanilla extract, and brought back memories of Christmas baking sessions. “Eau des Vanilliers” is harsher, and smells (to me) like vanilla mixed with butane.


But I am shocked at how much people like it.


“You smell good,” Apollonia said that day. “Better than usual, anyway.”


Toby sniffed at it and smiled. “It’s very ladylike,” he said.


I’ve written before about smelling like food. It is a surefire way to make friends; people love you if you smell like anything edible. (Creepy, isn’t it?) And I don’t mind smelling ladylike. I remember a study some years ago in which men were asked what scents they preferred, and they all said things like musk and cedar, but when they were actually asked to evaluate scents, they preferred the same floral scents that women preferred.

So there.


My preferred scent is “L’Occitan,” by L’Occitane. (Yes, I know.) It is lavender, with cedar, and burnt wood, and nutmeg, and black pepper. It is dark and interesting.


But you can’t wear the same thing every day.


I went to the fragrance kiosk in the Providence Place Mall a few weeks ago, and I asked the stupidest possible question: “What do you recommend?”


Naturally the salesman brought out lots of mid-price and high-price stuff. Some were okay. One had – I kid you not – no smell at all; I tried it twice and couldn’t detect anything. (Maybe my nose is configured incorrectly.) Finally I settled on a high-end Paco Rabanne scent, in a perfectly lovely bottle, with notes of grapefruit and rose and blood orange. (I didn’t get these from the salesman; I looked them up in basenotes.com later.)


It is a nice change from my other scent, and makes a pleasant alternative.


Then I discover from Tab (my coworker) and Al (my student assistant) that they don’t even wear something every day!


See, I assume that I stink, and that I need assistance in this area.


I will continue to assume this, until I am sure that it’s not true.


So if you smell pepper / nutmeg / burnt wood, or blood oranges /grapefruit / rose,  in your vicinity anytime soon, you can be reasonable sure that it’s me.

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The Darlingtonia preserve

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In 2005, on one of our trips to the Pacific Northwest, Partner and I were running up and down the Oregon coast: Lincoln City, Yachats, Florence. 

 

 

On our way to Florence I noticed an odd sign pointing to a DARLINGTONIA PRESERVE.  The name rang a very faint bell, but I couldn’t quite place it, and I suggested that we stop.

 

 

I am so glad we did.

 

 

It is a small park which serves as a natural preserve for a rare local plant, the Darlingtonia californica, aka the cobra lily.

 

 

Darlingtonia is a carnivorous plant resembling the pitcher plant.  Its body is a cup of water, topped by a cobra-like hood.  Insects blunder inside and fall into the water to drown; the hood helps keeps them inside if they try to escape.

 

 

Once they’re dead, Darlingtonia californica eats them up, slowly, by dissolving them and absorbing their delicious little bodies.

 

 

Bloodthirsty, I know. But the plants were gorgeous, and you have never seen so many together in one place in your life.  They were shining bright green in the fitful Oregon summer sunlight, hundreds of them in their damp little peat bog, humming to themselves, waiting for the little buggies to arrive for lunch.

 

 

Plants are remarkable.  We animals have always had an advantage over plants, seemingly; we move faster, anyway. But plants are sneaky and malevolent. Some are poisonous, like nightshade and datura and pokeweed. Some sting and burn, like nettles and poison ivy. Some are beautiful and dangerous, like the foxglove. Some can gash the hell out of you, like the cholla cactus. Some of them can poison the ground beneath themselves, so that nothing else can grow (many conifers do this).

 

 

But all of them, just like Darlingtonia californica, are beautiful in the sunshine.

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Senior discount

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The other evening, after one of my old-ladyish treadmill workouts at the Boston Sports Club, I went over to the Eastside Marketplace next door to buy  a rotisserie chicken and a couple of tomatoes. I was still glowing with perspiration from my quasi-workout, and I thought I looked terribly buff and macho.

 

 

Imagine my surprise when the checkout girl gave me the senior discount without even asking me for my ID!

 

 

This was one of those landmark occasions. Remember the first time you didn’t get carded in a bar? Remember your 21^st birthday, or your 30^th, or your 40^th? This was kind of like that, but slightly more funereal.

 

 

Evidently I look old. I employ a lot of college students, and I have come to accept that I am usually older than their parents. (I have also come to accept that I have been working at the university longer than my student employees have been alive. I get a kind of perverse kick out of it, and I think so do they.)

 

 

But “senior discount.” Just think about that.

 

 

And the cashier didn’t even ask me

 

 

To be fair: it was Tuesday, which is “senior discount night” at Eastside Marketplace. The old trout behind me in line had to be at least a hundred and fifty years old. The checker (who looked maybe twenty) made the simple assumption that we were both there to take advantage of the “senior discount.”

 

 

And who doesn’t love a discount?

 

 

So, on the upside: I saved fifty cents on my rotisserie chicken and hothouse tomatoes.

 

 

On the other hand: people look at me and think “He’s old.”

 

 

Oh dear dear dear.

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For Sunday: the Scissor Sisters sing "Let's Have a Kiki"

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Information first: a “kiki” can be a chat, or a gossip session, or an impromptu party.

 

 

Now (not suitable for work! Not suitable for small children!): here’s the Scissor Sisters telling you: “Let’s Have a Kiki!”

 

 

(Seriously: this song has changed my life. I’m singing it all the time. It cheers me up tremendously. I hope it does the same for you.)

 

 

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Silly Bandz

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I was walking to work the other day when, while scanning the sidewalk (I’m always looking for pennies), I saw something like a rubber band in the shape of – I don’t know – a prom dress?

 

 

It made me smile. It was one of those Silly Bandz.

 

 

They were very big a few years ago. They were silicon bands in shapes – dinosaurs, musical instruments, cars – to be worn around the wrist. Some of the more desirable ones glowed in the dark. Kids were very obsessed with them, trading them, comparing them. Some schools banned them, because they were a distraction. There were rumors that they were badges of sexual conquest. (This was more of a Fox News / Christian fanatic kind of thing.)

 

 

Here’s how I heard about them:

 

 

A couple of years ago, I was going through a bad time.  My colleague Bill (who’s now at another job) asked what was the matter, and I told him, and he in turn told his kids (who’d met me) that Mister Loren was sad. His kids were very concerned about this, because they had never seen me sad.

 

 

So: they decided to send me some Silly Bandz: a roller-skate, and a circle, and a motorcycle.

 

 

I was overcome by this. I wore Bill’s kids’ gifts for months.  I was taking a new mood-stabilizing medication too, which I’m pretty sure helped me, but the Silly Bandz helped me too. I wore them for the duration – at least six months; probably closer to a year.

 

 

(Bill told me that his kids had a hard time deciding which Silly Bandz to give me. They wanted to give me good ones, but they didn’t want to give up anything really collectible. He talked them into giving me the motorcycle and the roller skate, which were both very collectible, but which they were reluctant to give up, even to poor depressed Mister Loren.)

 

 

(But they did anyway, bless them.)

 

 

To Bill’s kids: a big belated thanks. You helped me up when I was down.

 

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A Rhode Island political debate

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I went to a debate the other night. It was fabulous, in a dull political way. It was all Democrats, so you can imagine the crowd: old ladies, gay men like me, some politicos from around the state (and it ain’t a very big state). Our US congressman was there. So were several of the other members of the Rhode Island General Assembly. (It’s a very small state, and we don’t take these things lightly, even when they’re held in a neighborhood bookstore.)

 

 

First up were our current State Representative and his opponent. Current Representative is young, tall, handsome, charming, and very well-informed. Opponent was terribly nervous; he mostly agreed with what Current Representative said. His one talking point was that a local (mostly forgotten) business leader should instruct us on how to bring jobs back to Rhode Island. He was harmless, and everyone treated him with respect.

 

 

The other race, for a seat in the Rhode Island State Senate, was more serious

 

.

The incumbent is leaving, and has endorsed a candidate who’s never been in office before. Fine, right? Except, under scrutiny the other night, Endorsed Candidate was smug, and very sure of herself, and kept saying: “I don’t know the answer to that question, but I’m sure I can figure it out, once I’m in the Senate.”

 

 

Her opponent, on the other hand, was passionate, and well-informed, and spoke very well.

 

 

If Rhode Island politics-as-usual take place, Endorsed Candidate will get into office, just because she’s been endorsed.

 

 

And this is exactly where we need help.

 

 

The RI House is very liberal; the RI Senate, while Democrat, is pretty conservative. We need more liberals in the RI Senate.

 

 

I’m voting for the smart opponent over the snippy presumptuous endorsed candidate.

 

 

And I’m telling all of the people I know. Because I’ve actually seen these people in action.

 

 

And this, children, is how democracy works.

 

 

Tell everyone you know.

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Social media (and especially Pinterest)

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Social media allow us to craft our own image and present it to the world, in ways that only a few artists and writers were able to do in the centuries before us. More than that: we can do it over and over again, in various ways. We don’t have to present ourselves on Facebook in the same way that we do on LinkedIn, or Tumblr, or Twitter.

 

 

Take me, for example. My Facebook persona is pretty vanilla. I repost this blog to my Facebook feed, but I suspect very few of my sixty-odd “friends” read it. And, after all, why would they? Facebook Loren is mostly 1970s Pacific Northwest Loren. A large percentage of my Facebook friends are my school acquaintances from Battle Ground, and various Pacific Northwest relatives. As you can imagine, their politics vary considerably from mine, in most (though not all) cases. So: we stick to safe topics, and harmless photos, and nostalgia.

 

 

LinkedIn Loren is very dull: he’s just a brief resume.  He has a reasonable number of connections, but (since he’s not actively looking for a job) he’s not out there roaming the LinkedIn network very much. Mostly I use LinkedIn to find out what my various work acquaintances are doing nowadays. Now and then I’m amused to find that some of them are exaggerating their titles, and their experience, and their education, and their accomplishments. (But I won’t rat them out. Not here, anyway. Give me a call, and I’ll tell you all about it.)

 

 

Twitter Loren is a nonentity. This blog reposts there too, but I seldom look at Twitter; it’s too busy, too full of chatter.

 

 

Blog Loren is the same person on Posterous, Tumblr, Blogger, and WordPress, as this goes out to all four. Three of them – Posterous, Blogger, and WordPress – are full of windy pontificators like me, so I’m just a face in the crowd there. I’m not really at home on Tumblr, which is really more about images and memes and being cutting-edge. I like Tumblr, though, more as a subscriber (and occasional reposter) than as a contributor. Few people on Tumblr read me, but I read and look at lots of people on Tumblr, and enjoy them very much.

 

 

Then there is (or was) Pinterest Loren.

 

 

I heard about Pinterest, and decided to try it. I was sort of charmed by it; I liked the mosaic layout of the pages, and the variety, and the ease with which you can browse, and the way you can click through a pinned image to an original website. In no time at all, Pinterest Loren had lots of stuff pinned: funny pictures, and cute puppies and kitties, and cute G-rated men, and pretty landscapes, and . . .

 

 

OMG.

 

 

Pinterest Loren was a sixteen-year-old girl.

 

 

I deactivated Pinterest Loren not long ago. I don’t think he/she will be back anytime soon.

 

 

I think I did the world a favor.

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Jeremy Renner

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I mostly knew Jeremy Renner from his part in “The Town,” with Ben Affleck. Jeremy played a thug / bank robber with great abandon, and he has big staring eyes and a strange dominating presence, and he’s very real.

 

 

This is a big deal in the movies. You need to look real.

 

 

I heard last spring that he was playing Hawkeye in the forthcoming Avengers movie, and I smirked a little. Minor role in a major movie: who cares?

 

 

Well, he was wonderful. He was creepy and elegant and very convincing. He also bulked up amazingly, and did not look ridiculous when appearing with Iron Man and Thor and the Hulk at all; in fact, he looked like their peer.

 

 

Now he’s playing a superhuman secret agent in “The Bourne Legacy.” He still has that huge bulked-up body, and those chilly eyes. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I’m already in love with him. My friend Apollonia (who has vowed herself to Robert Pattinson) has admitted to me that she finds Jeremy attractive.

 

 

And now I discover that Jeremy, before his very successful career as an actor, was a makeup artist.

 

 

Behold this sequence from a recent episode of “Ellen”:

 

 

 

 

He is adorable.

 

 

I don’t care if he’s gay or straight. (He looks straight to me, but I’ve been wrong about these things before.)

 

 

He is a fine actor, and is also very cute, and can do makeup, and packs on muscle very nicely when necessary.

 

 

As someone online said: “It’s nice to have something to fall back on, in case Plan A fails.”

 

 

Jeremy has lots of things to fall back on.

 

 

Whatta guy!

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Tough girls: Anne Hathaway edition

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Partner and I have not been to the movies much this summer. Neither of us has been feeling great this summer, and – frankly – the summer movies (since “The Avengers,” anyway) haven’t been that appealing.

 

 

Finally, last weekend, we went to the movies, and saw “The Dark Knight Rises.”

 

 

Oh, kids, it’s got everything: explosions, and Tom Hardy, and Gary Oldman, and Christian Bale, and the destruction of Manhattan (AKA Gotham City), and Liam Neeson.

 

 

You know I am mostly about the boys. You expect me to drool over Christian’s abs, or Tom’s gigantically developed chest and back. (All of which are fine, by the way.)

 

 

But I want to speak to you about Anne Hathaway.

 

 

I always thought of her as a lightweight actress, a comedienne: “Princess Diaries,” “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Alice in Wonderland.” I think she’s very pretty – I love her big dark eyes – but as a gay man, I realize that my estimations of a woman’s sexiness are maybe not the same as a straight man’s.

 

 

But Anne Hathaway is utterly wonderful in “The Dark Knight Rises.”

 

She is Catwoman. The movie is smart enough not to call her by that name. She’s a clever thief who dresses in a tight-fitting cat costume when it suits her. She is skillful enough to baffle the omniscient Batman.

 

 

That’s the character. But the actress – ah. Anne is funny. She switches from droll to deadly serious in milliseconds. Her voice goes from obsequious to flat to sarcastic in nothing flat. Her face, even behind a mask, is wonderfully expressive. (Spoiler alert! But not much of a spoiler alert.) At one point in the movie, she and Batman are working in concert. He’s trying to show her how to use his Bat-motorcycle.  He begins to speak –

 

 

And she leaps onto the Bat-cycle, revs the motor – vroom vroom! – and looks bored. “Yeah, I think I got it,” she says.

 

 

She is a certified tough girl.

 

 

There have been lots of Catwomen on TV and in the movies: Eartha Kitt, Julie Newmar, Lee Meriwether, Michelle Pfeiffer, Halle Berry.

 

 

Anne Hathaway is the best of the lot.

 

 

Vroom vroom!

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Cabbage butterflies

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I like butterflies, especially the big 747 models with snazzy colors, like the monarchs and the swallowtails. But I also have a nice feeling about the simple dull colorless ones; they give a pleasant fluttery feeling to the day when you see them, and they seem pretty harmless. (As Bart Simpson once said: “No one ever suspects the butterfly.”)

 

 

For example: now and then I see cabbage butterflies, AKA cabbage moths, AKA Pieris rapae. You know them: the white ones that swirl and dart through the garden like animated dinner napkins.

 

 

My parents used to grow basketball-sized cabbages, and the cabbage butterflies loved them. They don’t eat them, you see; they lay their eggs in them. Then their children (green oozy-looking caterpillars) eat the cabbage.

 

 

My mother hated those caterpillars. She had a giant salt-shaker of some infernal pesticide, which she used on the cabbages the way you’d sprinkle Parmesan on your spaghetti. It certainly didn’t kill all the caterpillars, and I marvel that it didn’t kill all of us. (One of our neighbors saw her strewing poison on her cabbages once, and wrote a letter to the local paper about “my neighbor lady who sprinkles poison on her vegetables.” He also said something like “I’d rather eat a bug once in a while than poison my own food.”)

 

 

(We thought he was crazy. Forty-five years later, I see that he was ahead of his time.)

 

 

Mom’s poison didn’t seem to reduce the population of cabbage butterflies, as I recall. And what’s a summer day, after all, without a few cabbage butterflies wheeling and pirouetting in the sunlight? 

 

 

I suspect that, if I’d been born a butterfly, I’d have been a cabbage butterfly: not extraordinarily beautiful, but with my own quiet charm.

 

 

And I do like cabbage once in a while.

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For Sunday: the Violent Femmes want to know if you like "American Music"

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The Violent Femmes are one of those groups I didn’t know about until recently. Their song “Blister in the Sun” is pretty wonderful. But this song is my very favorite. There is something sublimely creepy about the band’s performance here. And the video has everything: Fifties outfits, Motown, country music, panpipes, elderly people, kachina dolls, disco . . .

 

 

“You were born too late / I was born too soon / But every time I look at that ugly moon / It reminds me of you . . .”

 

 

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Poke

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Poke is a weed that grows all over the Eastern and Southern United States. I see it everywhere in Providence; it is very beautiful, and very toxic. It has deep green leaves and white flowers and juicy-looking purple berries, all of which are very poisonous if you eat them unawares. (The berries can be used to make ink; the Founding Fathers used pokeberry ink to write the Constitution.)

 

 

The leaves are (just barely) edible, if you cook and rinse them a couple of times. Some say rinse them twice; some say three times. You used to be able to buy the leaves canned, but not so much anymore.

 

 

There’s a song, by Tony Joe White, in 1968, that tells the whole story:

 

 

 

 

I don’t want any poke salad. Then again: maybe I want to know what it tastes like. Even if it’s poisonous.

 

 

I am just perverse that way.

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Faking it

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Back in 1981, I was offered a job up on Federal Hill in Providence. My new boss took me to a shadowy back room and showed me a machine that looked like a cross between an electric organ and a typewriter.  “Have you ever used one of these?” he asked.

 

 

“You bet,” I lied, my mouth dry.

 

 

I managed to figure it out. Within a few months, I was the only person in the place who really knew how to use the thing.

 

 

For a long time I felt guilty about this. Then, again and again in my personal life, I found myself faking expertise in a particular field. I still didn’t feel good about it, but at least I was becoming a more proficient liar.

 

 

Now I read this article by Luke Johnson in the Financial Times. He tells a story about taking a job as a DJ, when he had a big record collection but no experience. He figured it out. Lesson: many successful people begin their careers by faking expertise.  (Evidently there was even a British TV show about this: people taking on jobs/roles that they had no background for.)

 

 

When I was young, I used to be more or less terrified of adulthood, because I believed that I didn’t know the rules. Adults always seemed to know what to do; they seemed so natural. I tried to figure out the rules; I tried to learn the right things to do.

 

 

Now I realize it’s all about faking it

 

 

And what’s wrong with that?   Life isn’t a quiz; there’s no answer key. We just do the best we can.

 

 

What else are we doing in this life, from dawn to dusk and after, but faking our way through?

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Tough girls

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Apollonia and I were talking the other day (don’t ask me why) about Flavor Flav and Brigitte Nielsen.  “I like Flavor Flav,” I said.  “I wish I had the nerve to wear an alarm clock around my neck.”

 

 

“I like Brigitte Nielsen,” Apollonia said definitively.  “She’s – real.  She’s very real.”

 

 

“Well, she’s huge, that’s for sure,” I said.  “I remember the first picture I saw of her, right after she married Sylvester Stallone.  She was at least six inches taller than him, not counting the ostrich plumes she was wearing on her head.”

 

 

“But real,” Apollonia said definitively. 

 

 

Like Apollonia, I admire women who take charge. Brigitte, for example; can you imagine what that marriage must have been like?  (Not that Sly's not a scrappy little bruiser.  But still.)

 

 

Then there’s Grace Jones.  I remember her from one of the “Conan” movies as a terrifying-looking warrior. I also remember her from the Pee-Wee Herman Christmas special in the early 1990s, singing “The Little Drummer Boy,” swinging her arms and looking like a renegade android.

 

 

Also Tina Turner.  If you’ve never seen the movie version of “Tommy,” go watch it: Oliver Reed! Ann-Margret! But also, for a few scary minutes, Tina Turner as the Acid Queen, vibrating like you can’t imagine.

 

 

And let’s not even mention Cher (whom Partner and I saw some years ago here in Providence, and who was amazing, and who (I think) smiled at us).

 

 

I’m with Apollonia on this one. 

 

 

Tough girls: represent!

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The Olympics, London 2012: a postscript

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I am sorry to see the London Olympics end. It was a jolly old time: lots of surprises, lots of upsets, lots of new friends. Glad about so many things:

 

 

·       Glad to see Michael Phelps win his eighty-two medals and announce his retirement, which means we don’t have to look at his ugly sub-primate face anymore, except maybe in Subway Sandwich advertisements.

·       Glad, in a different way, to see Usain Bolt (from a much smaller country than Michael Phelps) prove once again that he’s the fastest runner in the world, and be smug about it, and we’ll probably see him again in 2016, and he will be at least three times as smug, and probably even faster.

·       Glad to see lots of smaller / less populous countries win medals of all kinds: Grenada, Mexico, Tunisia, Ireland, Slovenia.  (Grenada, with its one gold medal, has the most gold medals per capita of any country in world. In your face, Michael Phelps!)

 

 

(Which reminds me: I truly want to see India win a gold medal one of these days. They’ve never won a gold, in all these years. It will be madness in Chennai and Mumbai when that day comes.)

 

 

The London closing ceremony, like the opening ceremony, was controlled chaos, slathered with lots of music. The opening ceremony was meant to be thought about, and talked about. This closing ceremony was just meant to be fun. (There’s a very heavy message in listening to The Who – the members of which are in their sixties at least – sing “My Generation.”  It makes me feel strange. Isn’t there a line in there that says “Hope I die before I get old”? Doesn’t Roger Daltrey feel funny when he sings that?)

 

 

Also Eric Idle, leading a huge chorus of everything and everyone imaginable (including nuns and Roman soldiers) in “Look On the Bright Side of Life,” from the Python movie “Life of Brian.” This bookended the Rowan Atkinson “Chariots of Fire” number in the opening ceremony, with that kind of deranged I-don’t-care British humor that the world has come to cherish. And it turned into a singalong with the audience!

 

 

And then Boris Johnson, the highly peculiar Mayor of London, handed over the Olympic flag to Jacques Rogge, who handed it over to Eduardo Paes, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, where the 2016 Olympics will take place.

 

 

(Can you imagine what that opening ceremony will look like?  We had glimpses: there was a samba spectacular, and Pele made an appearance! And one of the performers was dressed as the Santeria goddess Yemanja, goddess of the sea!)

 

 

See you in Rio, kids!

 

 

(If I live that long.)

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The Church of the SubGenius

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I am pleased to say that I own a tattered first-edition (paperback) copy of “The Book of the SubGenius.”

 

 

This is a bunch of stories / collages / imaginings created in the 1970s and 1980s by a group of creative nuts who made up their own religion using 1950s advertising iconography, UFO lore, some William Blake, some Star Trek, a dash of H. P. Lovecraft, and lots of memories of Sunday School.

 

 

It’s impossible to explain their theology. Let it suffice to say that their messiah is a grinning pipe-smoker named J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, who appears as the daddy in every 1950s print ad (see the above image for an example). "Bob" was sent to warn us against the coming Weird Times. According to SubGenius belief, the world is a bad experiment created by a renegade entity called Jehovah-1, or Ra, or Wotan; we’re expecting some aliens called the Xists anytime now (actually, they were supposed to arrive in 1998).

 

 

The creepy thing about this book is that some of their lunatic comedy prophecies actually came true. They predicted global warming, and the fall of the USSR. They also predicted that, in the early 1990s, teenagers would begin wearing broomsticks up their asses, so they didn’t get everything right.

 

 

One of my favorite SubGenius concepts was the ShorDurPerSav: the Short Duration Personal Savior. If you ever encounter someone (or something) you like, that person / thing becomes your ShorDurPerSav. It can be a bowl of ice cream; it can be a friendly dog. I feel no shame in telling you that I have adopted this concept into my life. The cute little UPS man can be my ShorDurPerSav for five minutes, before I move on to something else.

 

 

I also like the titles the SubGenii made up for themselves: HellSwami, Rev. Dr. Dr. Pope, BurnMartyr, Dominatrix. (And I haven’t even mentioned the magical drug Habafropzipulops, or the Fightin’ Jesus, or the plant-based Xist computer MWOWM.)

 

 

I’m not a SubGenius myself. But maybe I should convert.

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A real American hero

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Since the mass murder in Aurora, Colorado a few weeks ago, and the mass murder in Oak Creek, Wisconsin right after that, I have tried to write something. But words fail me.

 

 

The barbarity and insanity of the shooters? Nothing to be said there.

 

 

The fact that both shooters had free access to military-style weapons and ammo (not to mention bullet-proof garb)? Well, kids, you’re living in a guns-are-great society. We are told by the NRA that this is actually an argument for less gun control, as this wouldn’t have happened if everyone in that Aurora theater had been armed. (Actually, I visualize it being much worse, since – even if the other people in the theater had been armed – they wouldn’t have been wearing Kevlar, as the shooter was. Imagine what would have happened if a gunfight had broken out! How many more would have died?)

 

 

(Did you note that there was an odd incident recently? A guy was found toting guns, etc.. into a theater. He said he was trying to defend himself against Aurora-style shooters. Who was to say he wasn’t an Aurora-style shooter himself? Are you going to start wondering, every time you go to the movies, if the guy/girl next to you is packing heat?)

 

 

I despair of the gun-tolerant USA. Evidently it’s okay to have a basement full of military-style armamentaria, because the Bill of Rights (written in the enlightened 1780s, before semi-automatic weapons) says it’s fine. Great. Enjoy the hell you’ve made for yourselves, you stupid gun freaks.

 

 

And then there’s the imbecility of the Oak Creek incident: the shooter thought (idiotically) that anyone wearing a turban was The Enemy, and found a local (and completely inoffensive) Sikh temple with lots of turban-wearing men, and shot it up during a worship service.

 

 

Despair, despair, despair.

 

 

Then I read this: “His community under attack, Sikh Temple of Wisconsin president Satwant Singh Kaleka fought back with all his strength and a simple butter knife, trying to stab a murderous gunman before taking two fatal gunshots to the leg.”

 

 

Sikh men carry a ceremonial dagger. Satwant Singh Kaleka carried a butter knife. He used his butter knife to defend – and ultimately save – his own mother, and succeeded.

 

 

Gun nuts of America: please scrutinize the image at the top of this blog carefully. It’s a picture of a dark-skinned bearded man wearing a turban.

 

 

It is a picture of a real American hero.

 

 

Now, you filthy primates, scurry back into your rat-infested dens and grease up your Glocks and chatter about the Second Amendment.

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For Sunday: Donovan sings "Starfish-on-the-Toast"

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Here, from a very long time ago (1967!), is a drowsy Donovan song about the beach in midsummer, and looking for shells, and seagulls “pillaging the town.”

 

 

It’s lovely.

 

 

Enjoy.

 

 

 

21_Starfish-On-The-Toast.mp3 Listen on Posterous

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The truffle crisis

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As you may or may not know, there is a truffle crisis in Europe.

 

 

The European black truffle, Tuber melanosporum, is cherished by gastronomes everywhere. It has an indescribable flavor and aroma. It is rare and cannot be cultivated easily. It is hunted by dogs and pigs, which dig them up, but which are not allowed to eat them. (Apollonia tells me that the pigs are given acorns as a reward. Do you call that justice?) It grows symbiotically with the roots of certain trees, usually the oak.

 

 

(There are also white truffles (Tuber magnatum), and pecan truffles, and Oregon truffles. Go read about them on Wikipedia.)

 

 

The European truffle crop has been much smaller lately, partly due to climate change. Given how much demand there is for them, this is a problem.

 

 

There are also Chinese truffles (Tuber himalayensis / Tuber indicus). They grow much more easily than their European cousins. They have little or no flavor. They are being brought to Europe, and mixed in with European truffles, the way cocaine dealers mix flour or sugar in with their product.

 

 

Also: the spores of the Chinese truffle are beginning to escape into the local environment, and Chinese truffles are now growing in Europe. It is feared that, like kudzu, the Chinese truffle will crowd out the aristrocratic European varieties.

 

 

(I have never knowingly tasted a truffle. I think I’ve had things with truffles in them, but I have no clear recollection. Apollonia tells me that her Italian relatives have whole rooms full of them, and eat them like apples, but I am never sure how much faith to put in her little stories.)

 

 

I have given before the recipe for salade Rossini.  I have never made it. Perhaps I never will. But I like reading (and thinking about) the recipe:

 

 

·       Potatoes cooked in chicken stock;

·       Mussels (a third less than the potatoes);

·       “As many truffles as the budget will allow, sliced and cooked in champagne”;

·       A nice fruity vinegar and olive oil and salt and pepper and some tarragon over all. 

 

 

It sounds delicious.

 

 

Children: don’t allow the Chinese truffle to ruin our imaginary salade Rossini. Insist on the black European truffle.

 

 

Western culture depends upon it.

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August

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(Note: this is a silly sentimental blog, about the passage of time, daily life, getting older, etc. If you don’t like that kind of thing, stop reading now.)

 

 

Okay. Here goes:

 

 

I have always loved the month of August. In the Pacific Northwest where I grew up, it was usually the month in which we got some warm dry weather. As a kid, I knew it meant we were going back to school soon, but it didn’t seem to matter. Time seemed to stop in mid-August. It was (as my mother said) “beach weather”: sunny and warm and pleasant.

 

 

It’s no different here in Rhode Island. August can be brutally hot and humid here, but there are also days when it’s just – pleasant. The girls and I were sunning ourselves outdoors at lunchtime recently, and Cathleen said: “It’s a beach day.” And she was exactly right.

 

 

Sometimes there are storms, or long angry heatwaves. No matter. We know that September's right around the corner, and – whatever else happens – the weather changes in September. (Last year there was a hurricane working its way up the coast at the end of August. We lived through it.)

 

 

Sometimes – even in mid-August – there’s an occasional cool breeze. It seems to come out of nowhere. It’s a foretaste of autumn, get it? It’s a message that summer is not going to last forever.

 

 

And there are the Perseids. This is a meteor shower that happens around mid-August (this year’s peak comes next weekend, around the 11^th and 12^th of August). It is supposed to be one of the year’s most spectacular displays. (I wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen a single bloody meteor. I’ve tried: I’ve waited up, and gone out in a lawn chair, and faced north. Not a single shooting star have I ever seen.)

 

 

Time stands still in mid-August. We know that summer is almost over: but it’s not over yet. The office is quiet, because so many people are away. The streets are quiet, because so many people are on vacation. Labor Day’s right around the corner, and the return to work will happen soon.

 

 

But we don’t need to think of that, do we?

 

 

Not yet, anyway.

 

 

Bring on the Perseids.

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Again with the Olympics

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Are you bored with the Olympics yet? Not me! It’s been a thrill a minute. Not so much the events, which I find mostly pretty dull. But the stories, egad, the stories!

 

 

Roll the presses:

 

 

Two brothers from Yorkshire won (respectively) the gold and bronze medals in the triathlon. (No, I didn’t know what the triathlon was either. It’s an endurance event, something like the American Iron Man events; contestants have to swim, and run, and cycle, in quick succession.) The UK is over the moon about this. According to Oma, my informant who lives in Luton, not far from London, the brothers wanted to cross the finish line simultaneously, but were told they couldn’t.  (Have you heard about this? Me neither, until Oma tipped me off, and then I read an article in the Financial Times on Wednesday morning. I know: we care mostly about American athletes, and NBC figures we couldn’t care less about a couple of nice young men from Yorkshire. But what a story!)

 

 

A weightlifter from Germany dropped the barbell on himself. It was a pretty horrible scene: a German athlete, Matthias Steiner (who won the gold medal in Beijing in 2008), was hoisting 432 pounds over his head, and his arms buckled, and the weight came down on top of him. It gave me pause. Some of these events are dangerous. You can at least sprain or injure yourself while weightlifting (for example), and at worst you can actually drop a huge weight on yourself, as happened here. Remember the poor young Georgian in Vancouver, Nodar Kumaritashvili, only twenty-one years old, who wiped out on the luge and died of his injuries? Remember poor young Greg Louganis, who hit his head on the diving board back in 1988? He said it didn’t hurt that much, but I cannot imagine hitting your head on a diving board while spinning around in the air feels all that great. (There are certain events that carry little risk of personal injury; table tennis comes to mind. Yes, I know, things can still happen while playing table tennis, but – you know? I could go in the kitchen right now to make a sandwich, and slip, and hit my head on the counter.)

 

 

The beach volleyball matches have turned into the hot ticket at the London games. A FT columnist wrote a very funny column on Wednesday about the matches: it’s like a party, everyone in the stands is drinking and having fun, there are dancers on the floor of the arena between matches, and the announcer is more like a party DJ. Now: don’t you wish you were there, even though you don’t care two bits for volleyball?

 

 

Grenada has a gold medal. Remember Grenada? The USA invaded it in 1983, for some reason I don’t quite remember. Well, they have a gold medalist, Kirani James, in the men’s 400-meter. The whole island has gone properly insane, and was given a half-day holiday to celebrate. (I remember, when I was in Morocco in 1984, we (Moroccans) won two gold medals. The country went berserk. I was in Casablanca on the day the athletes came home from Los Angeles, and it was proper bedlam. It puts Michael Phelps’s smirking about winning seventy-five medals into perspective. Who cares if you’re a medal-winning freak from a country that always wins anyway? We like to see the less-represented countries win. It’s kind of what the Olympics are all about. Right?)

 

 

Iceland keeps trying to win a gold medal in handball. I will not even try to tell you the backstory on this one. Here’s the outline: Iceland has had a hard time over the past couple of years, economic collapse, blah blah blah. They won the silver medal in handball in Beijing in 2008. (There is a museum in Reykjavik which displays a sculpture called “The Icelandic Handball Team”; it’s a set of full-sized silver penises, which denote national pride.) Iceland was hell-bent to win gold this year. As of this writing, they have lost their chance. But they are doughty. And there’s always 2016, providing the Maya are wrong about this whole end-of-the-world thing

 

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Swans win gold in London. From Wednesday’s FT: “London is now so obsessed with the Olympics the very wildlife turned to imitation: on the Serpentine a five-strong group of swans broke away from a peloton of Canada geese.”

 

 

Even the swans and geese are getting into it.

 

 

As Oma, in Luton, wrote to me the other day: “It's been a great games so far and I'm loving it, loving it, loving it.”

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Maira Kalman

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Maira Kalman is a writer and artist and thinker. She has created something I can only call the “graphic essay,” and which can only be understood by looking at / reading one.

 

 

Her graphic world is full of bright colors and unusual angles. Her unique calligraphy swoops and flies among her images. She loves capturing Daily Life: hats, kitchen sinks, burger platters.

 

 

 

One of Maira's great themes is ephemerality: the preciousness of every moment that passes, under the threat of mortality. Every moment, for her, becomes a visual poem.

 

 

Here are the first few images from one of her “And the Pursuit of Happiness” pieces:

 

 

 

Never in a million years could I have come up with “soigné diatoms.” Nor could I have rhymed “Beringia” with “herringia,” nor seen the obvious link between motorcycles and dinosaurs.

 

 

The sketches and paintings and drawings are all her own work, and the photos, and that candy / cookie / Play-Doh single-celled creature at the beginning.

 

 

But the real magic lies in the combination of all these with her words, and her thoughts.

 

 

She described herself in a recent Thinkr video as a “loopy optimist,” and I think that’s appropriate, but I think she’s too modest. Here’s the video:

 

 

 

 

She has written on history, and democracy, and travel, and music. She has shared chocolate with both Kitty Carlisle Hart and Louise Bourgeois, and shown us both encounters:

 

 

"Nature is the guarantee of sanity. Or maybe love. Or both. Or not. Anyway . . ."

 

 

I feel extraordinarily encouraged when I read her essays. They make me feel that it might actually be worthwhile to continue for a few days or months more on Planet Earth.

 

 

And for that: thank you, Maira Kalman.

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Olympics update, dateline August 7, 2012

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I am enjoying the Olympics this summer.  They are chock-full of peculiar stories, and give me many a laugh and tear.

 

 

For example:

 

 

There was a badminton scandal. Apparently, eight players from South Korea, Indonesia, and China were throwing their own matches, in order to play against (and presumably beat) lower-ranked teams. The press threw up a couple of images of indignant badminton players, which were pretty funny; also there was a spate of badminton jokes on television. My favorite was: “Isn’t badminton something you play at your family reunion?”

 

 

A man with no lower legs or feet is competing in a track-and-field event. Oscar Pistorius of South Africa, who was born without fibulae and had his legs amputated below the knees in childhood (see photo above), uses “running blades” to compete. He does pretty well. There has been a sniffy little argument about whether the blades give him an unfair advantage; they’re pretty bouncy, apparently, but they also give him a disadvantage at the beginning of the race, so it sort of balances out. And, says I, what’s stopping the other runners from having their legs amputated and using blades themselves? I know that I myself would not be able even to stand upright on running blades. So: good on Oscar Pistorius, as my British friends would say.

 

 

Doping has entered the GATTACA era. A Chinese swimmer won her race by swimming at unbelievable speed. An American official insisted she must either have been doping, or – more insidiously – undergone some kind of genetic modification. (This is all the rage at the moment – have you seen the trailer for the new Bourne movie?) The Financial Times ran a very sober article about this last week, citing the example of “Marathon Mouse,” which (after genetic modification) can run twenty-five times farther than an average mouse. This is creepy, and (to date) undetectable. Who can say what's going on?

 

 

Upsets are fun to watch.  Why do we root for someone who’s already a champion? Isn’t it more fun to watch an underdog win? I hate tennis, normally – it’s just bip-bap-bip-bap to me – but I was lucky enough to tune in on Sunday just as Andy Murray aced his match point past Roger Federer, and I thought that was just fine. I hate to see the same six or seven people winning all the time. (Hear that, Michael Phelps?)

 

 

I’m baffled as to why some sports are in the Olympics and others aren’t. I’ve made fun of badminton today, and trampoline last week. One of my colleagues at work thought “canoe slalom” was a person’s name rather than an event. And yet: no lacrosse in the Olympics. No squash. No cricket. No camogie. (Usually it’s because they’re not universally played. Lacrosse, for example, is pretty much limited to the US and Canada. Cricket is popular in the UK and a handful of Commonwealth / former Commonwealth nations. Camogie – well, give yourself ten points if you even know what camogie is. But what about rugby?)

 

 

Now and then it makes sense to me why something is an Olympic sport. Judo and taekwondo, for example: it’s easy to train for these, and inexpensive – all you need is a bathrobe and a floor mat.  There were dojos everywhere in North Africa when I was there in the 1980s. Archery and shooting are modern transformations of hunting skills. Wrestling is about as primal as you can get. (Also, it’s fun to watch.)

 

 

I’ve been learning stuff every day through these Olympics. I hope it continues right through the closing ceremonies, when (according to the Financial Times) the seven young athletes from the opening ceremony will hand the Olympic flag over to seven elderly CEOs, who will bill back the young athletes for tuition fees.

 

 

More soon.

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Whooping cough

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Above is a picture of me at the age of five months, in December 1957. As you can see, I was fat and adorable.

 

 

A few months later, I was scrawny and miserable.

 

 

It was because the whooping cough (AKA pertussis). I almost died of it, because I became very emaciated and weak. I made it through; my body’s immune system apparently fought it off long enough to save me.

 

 

I was only six months old, so I don’t remember a thing about it, thank god, but it must have been pretty terrible. Imagine: you're coughing continually, and you can’t keep down food or water, and you can’t sleep.

 

 

But – again, thank god – nowadays there is a vaccine.

 

 

But people like the idiotic Jenny McCarthy are telling you not to give your children the vaccine. It might make your children autistic! (This is ridiculous, of course. But a lot of people will believe a pretty (aging) blonde celebrity before they’ll believe their own doctor.)

 

 

A few years ago, one of my student assistants told me that, in her public health class, they’d played a recording of a child suffering from whooping cough. This, she said, was the greatest incentive they’d found to encourage parents to have their children vaccinated; once they’d heard the horrible reality, they were willing to tell Jenny McCarthy to go to hell.

 

 

Here, for those of you who are tough enough, is the sound of a child with pertussis. This was the caption on the sound clip: "[The patient] is three years old, and has a very severe case of the disease. She only coughs like this five or six times a day.  She coughs until her lungs are empty of air and then you hear several whoops one after the other as she tries to take a breath in. She frequently finishes an attack with vomiting."

 

http://www.whoopingcough.net/cough-child-muchwhooping.wav\

 

 

Heard enough?

 

 

If you have children, and they’re not vaccinated, go get them vaccinated right away.

 

 

Don’t make them go through what I went through.

 

 

And tell Jenny McCarthy to go to hell.

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For Sunday: Cat Stevens sings "Katmandu"

 

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I have loved this song since the mid-1970s. It is mystical and funny and strange, and has a lovely ethereal feel.  And I love the flute solo, and the time-signature shifts.

 

 

“Katmandu / I'll soon be seein' you / And your strange bewildering time / Will hold me down . . .”

 

 

Enjoy.

 

 

08_Katmandu.mp3 Listen on Posterous

 

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Tough girls: Olympics edition

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The Olympics sometimes gives us athletes with nice backstories. This year is especially fruitful in that regard.

 

 

(Not so much with the guys. We were just told – by his mother! – that Ryan Lochte likes one-night stands best. Also, Michael Phelps is looking and acting more like a douchebag every single day. Let them have their various medals, and they can go stand in the corner.)

 

 

Now let’s talk about the girls.

 

 

Tough girl number one: Kayla Harrison, 22 years old, is the first American to win a gold medal in judo. This alone is a wonderful thing. But listen: she was abused by her first judo instructor, one Daniel Doyle. She hated judo, naturally, because she associated it with her abuser. Then, at the age of 16, she came to a place with the unlikely name of Pedro’s Judo Center, in Wakefield, Massachusetts, and the father-and-son team of trainers there worked with her, and showed her what she could become.

 

 

Six years later, she is an Olympic gold medalist in the sport she hated.

 

 

Here’s another tough girl: Gabrielle Douglas. At sixteen, she won the gold in all-around gymnastics. Her form looked perfect, even to a nearsighted old gaffer like me. Apparently, it looked that way to the judges too. She’s been dubbed “the flying squirrel” because (I guess) of how tiny she is. Can’t we come up with something nicer than that? (How about “the Seagull”? Because she is beautiful as she flies.)

 

 

(I remember Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci in the 1970s and 1980s, and even in those Cold War years, we Americans still marveled at them. Now, in 2012, we have someone else to marvel at.)

 

 

Third tough girl: a British weightlifter, eighteen years old, named Zoe Smith.

 

 

People were writing online that she was “manly” and “unfeminine.”  She responded as follows:

 

 

[We] don’t lift weights in order to look hot, especially for the likes of men like that. What makes them think that we even WANT them to find us attractive? If you do, thanks very much, we’re flattered. But if you don’t, why do you really need to voice this opinion in the first place, and what makes you think we actually give a toss that you, personally, do not find us attractive? What do you want us to do? Shall we stop weightlifting, amend our diet in order to completely get rid of our ‘manly’ muscles, and become housewives in the sheer hope that one day you will look more favourably upon us and we might actually have a shot with you?! Cause you are clearly the kindest, most attractive type of man to grace the earth with your presence.

 

 

Oh but wait, you aren’t. This may be shocking to you, but we actually would rather be attractive to people who aren’t closed-minded and ignorant. Crazy, eh?! We, as any women with an ounce of self-confidence would, prefer our men to be confident enough in themselves to not feel emasculated by the fact that we aren’t weak and feeble. 

 

 

As an acquaintance on Tumblr said the other day: I wish that I’d been that smart and verbal and logical at eighteen. Evidently, being strong doesn’t keep you from being smart, even when you’re a girl.

 

 

And number four: Wojdan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani, a Saudi competitor in judo. She lost. But she was cheered by everyone, as one of the first two Saudi women ever to compete in the Olympics.

 

 

“Hopefully,” she said, “this is the beginning of a new era.”

 

 

Sister, we can only hope.

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